Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Prestige and Fukushima are among the greatest energy-related environmental disasters, whose consequences we are still paying for today.
Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez incident, the one that occurred on the Deepwater Horizon or the Prestige, and Fukushima are just five of the greatest environmental disasters to have happened in the course of extracting, transporting or producing energy over the last 30 years. All incidents linked to oil and nuclear power, whose impacts on the environment remain devastating to this day.
A fault in reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, near Kyiv, caused it to explode. It was 26 April 1986, 31 years ago, when the greatest nuclear accident in history occurred. A radioactive cloud developed that first contaminated more than 500,000 workers (almost half the population of Milan), who were involved in attempts to contain the contamination. Radioactive substances continued to leak out, swelling the radioactive cloud that swept across the whole of Europe. A health problem of immense proportions emerged, given that, to this day, there has been no way of establishing with certainty the number of direct deaths, let alone indirect ones — people who died as a result of illnesses and genetic malformations caused by the radiation, which increased exponentially in the years that followed in many of the countries reached by the radioactive cloud.
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In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, named after Vladimir Lenin, was the most powerful in the former Soviet Union. At the time, there was no awareness of the catastrophe unfolding: the other three reactors at the plant continued to operate, and construction of the fifth and sixth reactors — later permanently abandoned — went on until May 1987, almost a full year.
Today, more than 30 years after the nuclear accident, the exploded reactor is covered by a sarcophagus 105 metres tall, 150 metres long, with a span of 257 metres, weighing 29,000 tonnes and, in the designers' intentions, expected to last at least 100 years. All around the plant there is nothing left: the city of Pripyat, which before the accident was home to 50,000 inhabitants, is now completely abandoned. The environmental costs linked to Chernobyl have never been precisely calculated, but are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars.
On 24 March 1989, the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound bay in Alaska, spilling between 41,500 and 119,000 cubic metres of crude oil into the sea — the equivalent of 17 to 47 Olympic swimming pools. A storm with winds of up to 70 kilometres per hour dispersed the oil far and wide. Tides rising up to six metres brought the oil to the surface and drove it deep into beaches. Two billion dollars were spent cleaning up the more than 1,900 kilometres of coastline contaminated by the ship's oil.
It took 11,000 men, 1,400 vessels and 85 aircraft to work on cleaning up the area, which began immediately and continued for the following three years. The costs were borne by Exxon, which an Alaskan court initially sentenced to pay a fine of 150 million dollars for environmental crimes. The verdict, once Exxon's full and effective cooperation in the clean-up operation had been confirmed, was revised downward from the figure sought by the prosecution. No sum could ever erase the environmental damage caused by one of the worst disasters in history to Prince William Sound, a rich marine ecosystem that was destroyed, devastating the habitats of the aquatic species that lived there and contaminating the nesting sites of vast numbers of birds. The incident is estimated to have caused the death of more than half a million seabirds, around a thousand otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles and 22 orcas, as well as millions of fish including salmon and sardines.
From Portugal to France, 1,700 kilometres of coastline and more than two thousand beaches destroyed by the black tide of 77,000 tonnes of crude oil spilled into the sea by the Prestige tanker, which on 13 November 2002 sustained enormous damage while crossing the Strait of Bonifacio in a storm. A stretch of water also known as the "Coast of Death", as sailors know well, for the treacherous nature of the sea there. Six days later, the tanker broke in two 250 kilometres off the Galician coast and sank to a depth of 3,600 metres. The damage was enormous: 17,000 birds dead, entire mussel harvests destroyed, more than 4 billion euros in confirmed economic and environmental damage — yet 11 years after the disaster, in 2013, the court's ruling acquitted everyone. No one was held responsible, neither criminally nor civilly, and no one will ever pay for the enormous harm caused.
The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people and caused an oil spill that, after 87 days, reached 780,000 cubic metres. It took more than five years for BP to be called to account — at least financially — for the damage caused to fish stocks, the ecosystem, the fishing economy and the health of all those living in the area affected by what was dubbed the "black tide".
In September 2014, a United States court found BP responsible for the disaster due to its gross negligence, and ordered the oil company to pay 18.7 billion dollars in compensation to the US "Gulf states" affected by the environmental disaster. According to the US Department of Justice, it was the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. This was also because the scale of the spill was record-breaking: the quantity of oil released into the sea is estimated to have been ten times greater than that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. A record-breaking settlement that nonetheless cannot repair the damage caused by the disaster. The pollution effects generated by the Deepwater Horizon are still ongoing. Researchers from Louisiana State University and Austin Peay State University in Tennessee have in fact demonstrated that the spilled oil entered the food chain of animals in the area. Another study by Endangered Species Research has highlighted the long-term damage to the dolphin population in the area, which, more than six years after the disaster, continues to suffer from severe lung diseases and hormonal disorders causing serious reproductive problems in the species.
The Fukushima accident is the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. On 11 March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck the northeast of Japan, claiming the lives of approximately 18,500 people, between deaths and missing persons, and causing the meltdown of the cores of three operational reactors. The 14-metre wave that flooded the plant at 3.35 pm knocked out 11 of the 12 cooling pumps and the entire safety system went into blackout. The explosions that pulverised the outer containment structures of reactor 4 were caused by hydrogen generated when hot steam came into contact with the overheated nuclear fuel rods. In those days, such an amount of radioactivity was released that the accident was classified as level 7, the maximum level reached only by Chernobyl.
More than 150,000 people were forced to abandon their homes to escape radioactive contamination. The nearby town of Tomioka remains abandoned to this day, and radiation levels are well above the permitted limits. In several surrounding areas too, the risk of radiation exposure remains very high, even though the government is pushing many displaced persons — still around one hundred thousand, roughly half of the original total — to return to their homes. The latest readings show 4.01 microSieverts per hour, levels 35 times higher than the maximum annual dose set by the Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. And a study by the University of Okayama has recorded an increase in thyroid cancers — as the World Health Organisation (WHO) had already anticipated in its initial assessments — among children and young people who were under 18 at the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.